Dr William Gilbert Grace
Some might not be familiar with the great W.G. Grace but he was a sporting legend. He dominated English cricket for a good portion of the nineteenth century and tormented many a bowler. Now he torments me.
Grace features fairly heavily in something I’m trying to translate into Chinese. In the English, he’s often referred to simply by his initials, W.G., so I’d like to find a way to do this in Chinese, but obviously it’s not strictly possible.
As far as I can tell, I have the option to call him either:
William Gilbert Grace 威廉·吉尔伯特·格雷斯
Grace 格雷斯
Surely that can’t be it, can it?
Where the English sometimes says W.G. Grace, sometimes says, Grace and sometimes says W.G., do I really have to say 格雷斯 every time?
A quick search on Wikipedia, for other famous people known by their initials, suggests that there is another option.
G.K. Chesterton G·K·切斯特顿
O.J. Simpson O·J·辛普森
V.S. Naipaul V·S·奈波尔
Though I note:
J.D. Salinger 杰罗姆·大卫·塞林格
So there’s another option. Just keep the English initials in with the Chinese text. This is no biggie. Most Chinese speakers can at the very least recognise Roman letters. My reluctance to use anything other than Chinese characters in the text is just daft, isn’t it?
But then it also occurs to me that I have one more option. Why not simply retain the initial character in each of the given names?
W.G. would become 威·吉
I guess J.D. Salinger could be 杰·大·塞林格.
Any thoughts?
I’d think him to be 杰·迪·塞林格, but then I’m not the translator. personally I rather like “G·K·切斯特顿”. How is he typically referred to in translations of his own works, I wonder.
I personally like the look of W·G·格雷斯.
And to be honest, I think I didn’t know the D in JD was David until reading that 大卫. I think abbreviating 大卫 to 大 isn’t good for me. Keeping the sound of the English initial feels cleaner to me.
I very much like the use of 迪 for ‘D’, and I think it would be far preferable to the approach I’ve suggested, but obviously such a substitution for ‘W’ would be rather less pleasing.
I may well end up with W·G·格雷斯 as you suggest.
I advise following standard Chinese academic usage: refer possibly once with the fullname, and then switch randomly between 威廉 and 吉尔伯特 and 格雷斯, never using one quite often enough to induce confidence in the reader that they know who you’re talking about.
If you can get through the first chapter with a healthy percent of your readers thinking 吉尔伯特 and 格雷斯 are two separate people, and perhaps relatives of this strange 威廉 chap, you win.
I think Trevelyan nailed it.
It’s interesting how they do it in Hindi and probably other Indic languages, they also write abbreviations in their own script, but write each letter phonetically, so that for example V. S. Naipaul becomes व्ही.एस. नायपॉल in Marathi (Vhi Es Naypaul). They do the same for full abbreviations,
Suverna International Institute of Management Studies (SIIMS) is written एस आई आई एम एस, or es ai ai em es.
Aside from Western names, there are already quite a few Chinese words whose standard written forms include English letters. Examples are X光, CD, KTV, QQ, etc., etc. (I still don’t know how to look these up in most Chinese dictionaries.) Written Chinese is slowly becoming a mixed-script language. So I see no impediment at all to writing W.G., which I think is an elegant solution.
@Stian
It would be wonderful if I could do the same thing in Chinese – it works better for some letters than others.
达布流·记·格雷斯
Dábùliú Jì Géléisī
I suspect Trevelyan would be pleased if I could throw this into the mix.
The comparison with Indian languages is very interesting for me as this is all part of a project to translate cricket terminology into Chinese. When I started this, my first thought was to check with Indian and Pakistani cricket-playing friends as to how they dealt with English cricketing expressions when speaking Hindi, Urdu or whichever language. All said that they simply insert the English expression into a sentence of whichever language. It’s my impression that these languages are much more easily able to do this than is Chinese/Mandarin. I guess Japanese handles borrowed sounds in its own way too.
@ Zev
I think you’re basically right here, but I find expressions like X光 particularly ugly. With the exception of DVD and VCD, I’ve not been able to think of many more common examples to add to your list.
I suppose the absence of any mention of 阿Q in the original post was something of an oversight.
Slight tangent:
Aside from the more recent 赵C naming controversy year or so back, I recently read in one of the Sino-Platonic written by John DeFrancis (The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform, p.7) a case where someone attempted to name his son 胡D, citing 阿Q as a precedent.
Needless to say his efforts failed when the hospital, after refusing to issue the birth certificate, appealed to the PSB who stamped the refusal, making it final.
Of course WG格雷斯 isn’t applying for his Chinese ID card or birth certificate.
Another relevant SPP, for those interested in Latin letters in Mandarin, is available here.
@Sima: In Taiwan, both QQ (referring to a particular texture of food) and A菜（a vegetable, commonly seen written this way on restaurant menus) are additional examples, as are KTV, MTV, and the like.
Every language is capable of borrowing vocabulary words from any other language. There is nothing inherently different about English borrowings into Chinese or Japanese than into Hindi or Maori. In each case, the particular sets of sounds and restrictions of syllable structure in the borrowing language will cause changes of pronunciation (or what linguists call accommodation) as part of the borrowing process.
Even a radical difference in sound structure between a given language and English is not an inherent impediment to borrowing. Japanese phonology is in many respects farther from English than Mandarin is, yet the Japanese have successfully borrowed many thousands of English words.
Other factors come into play. Cultural and historical factors, the degree of bilingualism within the population, native morpheme structure, and the writing system all have influence.
Incidentally, I think we are about to see an explosion of English borrowings entering Chinese.
@Zev
This pretty much covers why I feel that Hindi, say, has been more likely to absorb English expressions than has Mandarin/Chinese. As a couple of the factors you mention are obviously changing quite quickly in China, we may well begin to see increasing numbers of borrowed expressions. I certainly see a fair amount of switching by many of the people I communicate with regularly.
With the cricket project I’m working on, my aim has been to give young sportsmen and women access to the culture and language of the game, to allow them to absorb existing knowledge about the game and talk about technique and strategy. My first thought was that if cricketers in India use English to talk about cricket, why shouldn’t cricketers in China?
For all of the reasons you listed, and because the people with whom I’m most likely to have to communicate these things are chosen for their sporting, rather than academic or linguistic, prowess, I felt that the translation of the terminology was, for the time being, essential. Needless to say, creating suitable expressions in Chinese is not an easy task and various strategies have to be employed in various situations.
The translation of the Laws of Cricket was undertaken by bi/multi-lingual cricketers in Hong Kong a few years back. Interestingly, they chose to keep about twenty English terms, in Roman script, within the final Chinese text. I believe it was felt that these terms were either ‘untranslatable’ or ‘integral to the game’. Given the cultural, historical and linguistic background of Hong Kong, this would seem wholly reasonable. It’s my feeling, however, that this remains unacceptable for many, perhaps most, mainland Chinese. Indeed most of my mainland colleagues seem to have found it a rather intimidating document.
If we do see an increase in English expressions actually written within Chinese, it will be interesting to see if they go beyond the smattering of capital letters.
The Japanes have an interesting way of borrowing english by using Katakana (a separate set of two sylable) characters for their written form.
As to the translation of English, wouldn’t it just be possible to have a 3 column sort of solution, whereby the first column is the english word, secondly you figure out an IMHO approximation (for your sporters) thirdly you give a full explanation of what this term means in Chinese. Cricket and many other sports have historical roots in a different culture and different part of the world, i think it is inherent that some words should just not be translated to preserve the cultural ties of the sport.
For example japanese or Chinese martial arts when transferred to western countries also retain most of the denominations of the moves in Chinese or japanese. Most common example is the Ippon (lit 1 point, also meaning immediate end of a match) in Judo.
@Chris
I have largely shied away from the approach you describe, maybe foolishly. I’m certainly causing myself plenty of problems.
The main reasons were, I felt, firstly, that there were far too many words and phrases for players to remember (without meaningful connections) and that, secondly, there’s an awful lot of ‘knowledge’ tied up in the terminology and the relationships between terms. Given that many of the terms either end up being rather clumsy when transliterated (or end up stripped down to much smaller units, even further removed form their origins) and that there are a fair number of crucial distinctions which tend to get lost in transliteration, I’ve confined myself to only transliterating either as a last resort, or where the origins of the English words have all but been lost and the terms have become only labels for certain actions or occurrences on the cricket field and even the majority of experienced cricketers would be unable to say why we use a given term.
One great advantage of transliterating in the way you describe is that, as long as the phonetic similarities are strong enough, players, coaches and interpreters, should be able to quickly master the second language vocabulary – whether it be Chinese players having to communicate in English or overseas players having to make themselves understood in China. From this perspective, the next best approach seems to be to use fairly direct translations so that those with a basic knowledge of the two languages are able to see the connections between the two sets of vocabulary and quickly adapt, drawing on their overall knowledge of the language. This is the approach I’m using wherever possible.
I’m very much in favour of retaining some of the cultural ties, but also feel quite strongly that the game should not be completely alien. I suppose, in the name of promoting cricket (or any other sport) one might decide to use it as a vehicle for English teaching and all but give up on talking about the game in Chinese. That might well attract the support of parents and there could be a million kids, up and down the country, spending their weekends exercising, playing and learning English all in one Crazy-Sporty-English uber-activity (with eye-watering tuition fees). Actually, I can just see myself in the Olympic stadium with a giant PA system and ten thousand kids waving plastic cricket bats and, in unison, chanting back to me, ‘I will always play with a straight bat, even if you bowl me a googly!’ Er, sorry, I got a little carried away there.
Maybe I’m a little eccentric in not wanting the game to feel completely alien, when it clearly is. I was certainly quite struck when an old friend told me that when he played basketball as a boy (pre-PRC era) most terminology was adapted from English just as you describe. But whether any of those terms were ever written, I doubt. I suspect that Japanese is much better equipped to write such terms.
Have you done a lot of judo? How many terms do non-Japanese-speaking judo players have to retain? I’m most interested to hear about the potential comparisons.
To Sima
Japanese is quite odd in its retention of English loan words, they have lots, but they write them with a different set of syllabic characters, hence very distinguishable as foreign loanwords but incomprehensible most of the time to the uninitiated native english ear when spoken eg nyuu yoooku= New York, when you spell it out back again to our alfabet.
I m not much of a martial artist, but i did some study of Judo, Kendo and Aikido, depending on the Sensee (master) who teaches and how far you want to take it, you will have to retain quite a lot of names especially for the higher grades there are even exams on the names of movements where you have to give correct names (japanese names, in our alfabet)also everything surrounding the sport (eg tatami for floor mat, bokken for wooden sword, shinai for bamboo sword etc etc) is retained in its original japanese form (note I have not much experience with Chinese martial arts, but I suspect it to be the same)
I understand that you shied away from transliterating, its a horrible job, but with a chinese partner to help it can also be a very fun and creative process.
@Sima: Travelyan has nailed it. Bonus points if you can use more than one transliteration of ‘William.’ Extra bonus points if you add an explanatory footnote saying that William was originally a Norman name, and occurs in modern French as Guillaume, but adding no further information.
@Zev: I was under the impression that ‘QQ’ was just the way of representing a local reading of 嚼(嚼?) or something along those lines. May be misremembering, and it’s not like I know thing one about Taiwanese.